Michigan

Restrictions needed to manage domestic cat population

Today, I stood horrified as I watched a cat run away from a robin's nest on my property with a baby robin in its mouth, as the parent robins called their alarm. I had been in my back yard, and heard the pandemonium. Knowing I had a young group of robins in a nest near my drive, I ran to the front yard to watch in alarm as this tawny invader ran away, with its prey hanging dead in its jaws.

What had been a thriving nest yesterday, has now been wiped out by this marauder, and this is not the first time this year. Earlier, another nest that the robins had made on my property also fell victim to murder. That time, one of the dead babies was left under my window. This time, the evidence was taken back to its home.

I believe it is time for Ann Arbor (Washtenaw County for that matter) to require that cats, like dogs, not be allowed outside unless they are leashed or can be contained in some way within the boundaries of their owner's property. Certainly I don't begrudge cat owners having their animals, but I do not want them on my property killing the birds or yowling beneath my windows. They need to be managed responsibly by their human keepers.

Cats are the interlopers here. They are not indigenous to the United States, having been brought here by humans to control a rodent population. (Much like some breeds of dogs.) However, they have been recently identified as the lead cause of the destruction of our native bird population. It is currently estimated that domestic cats are the number one cause of the decline in our wild bird population, contributing to somewhere between 1.4 billion and 4.7 billion birds in a year, according to a recent study performed by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C.
In addition to free roaming owned cats, the management of free-ranging cats through Trap-Neuter-Return, simply places this predator back into the wild to continue killing our wild birds. As a dog owner, I am not allowed to simply open my door, allowing my dog out to freely wander the neighborhood, and I am required to license her. It is time to place these same restrictions on the cat owners in this community.

We are all animal lovers. Let us all love our animals responsibly, allowing the wild birds to thrive in Ann Arbor. We have the trees to shelter them, now let's make that shelter safe as well.